The Magicians - Lev Grossman [202]
The thick plottens.
Quentin buttonholed a colleague afterward—Dan, Don, Dean, one of those—and found out her name. It was Emily Greenstreet. The one and only and infamous. The girl Alice’s brother had died for.
Quentin’s hands shook as he pressed the elevator buttons. He informed his assistant that he would be taking the rest of the afternoon off. Maybe the rest of the week, too.
But it was too late. Emily Greenstreet must have spotted him, too—maybe it really was the fingers?—because before the day was over he had an e-mail from her. The next morning she left him a voice mail and attempted to remotely insert a lunch date into his Outlook calendar. When he got online she IMed him relentlessly and finally—having gotten his cell phone number off the company’s emergency contact list—she texted him:
Y POSTPONE THE INEVITABLE?
Y not? he thought. But he knew she was right. He didn’t really have a choice. If she wanted to find him, then sooner or later she would. With a sense of defeat he clicked ACCEPT on the lunch invitation. They met the following week at a grandly expensive old-school French restaurant that had been beloved of GHS executives since time immemorial.
It wasn’t as bad as he thought. She was a fast-talking woman, so skinny and with such erect posture that she looked brittle. Seated across from each other, almost alone in a hushed circle of cream tablecloths and glassware and heavy, clinking silverware, they gossiped about work. He hardly knew enough of the names to keep up, but she talked enough for both of them. She told him about her life—nice apartment, Upper East Side, roof deck, cats. They found that they had a funny kind of black humor in common. In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster. Who could possibly know that better than they—the man who watched Alice die, and the woman who’d essentially killed Alice’s brother? When he looked at her he saw himself eight years down the line. It didn’t look all that bad.
And she liked a drink or five, so they had that in common, too. Martini glasses, wine bottles, and whiskey tumblers piled up between them, a miniature metropolis of varicolored glass, while their cell phones and BlackBerries plaintively, futilely tried to attract their attention.
“So tell me,” Emily Greenstreet said, when they’d both imbibed enough to create the illusion of a comfortable, long-standing intimacy between them. “Do you miss it? Doing magic?”
“I can honestly say I never think about it,” he said. “Why? Do you?”
“Miss it, or think about it?” She rolled a lock of her mousy, chin-length hair between two fingers. “Of course I do. Both.”
“Are you ever sorry you left Brakebills?”
She shook her head sharply.
“The only thing I regret is not leaving that place sooner.” She leaned forward, suddenly animated. “Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods. They’re just kids, Quentin! With all that power! What happened to Charlie and me could happen again to any one of them, any day, any minute. Or worse. Much worse. It’s amazing that place is still standing.” He noticed that she never said “Brakebills,” just “that place.” “I don’t even like living on the same coast with it. There’s practically no safeguards at all. Every one of those kids is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off!
“Somebody needs to get control of that place. Sometimes I think I should blow their cover, get the real government in there, get it properly regulated. The teachers will never do it. The Magician’s Court will never do it.”
She chattered on in that vein. They were like two recovering alcoholics, hopped up on caffeine and Twelve Step gospel, telling each other how glad they were to be sober and then talking about nothing but drinking.
Though unlike recovering alcoholics they could and did drink plenty of alcohol. Temporarily revived by a molten affogato, Quentin went to work on a bitter single malt Scotch that tasted like it had been decanted through the stump of an oak tree that had been killed